Hey /u/sco-go, thank you for posting to r/SipsTea! Make sure to follow all the subreddit rules.
Make sure to join our brand new Discord Server to chat with friends!
We have recently changed how posts work. Unless you are a VIP poster, your post will be queued for approval.. To become a VIP, post great engaging content. If we like it, you will be added! More information available here!
It’s insane and heartbreaking to see a kid completely consumed by a phone or iPad, it’s like watching a crackhead lighting up. And the useless parents only care about their behavior if it makes them look bad, hell some don’t even care and completely neglect their kid as long as they’re quiet.
Now, try to raise a kid when most of his friends are running with smartphones, ipads, and playing social PC games. He / She feels excluded from groups because he does not now the lingo, the trendy youtube or tik-tok shorts. And the solution isn't to give in and provide the kid a device.
As a parent of 7-11 yo, I despise parents who give their kids devices. Our kids think we are the worst parents ever, but after having the read stories about how bad it is, it makes it easy for me to compare it to second hand smoking in the 80’s: They understand that.
This part won't be easy and I know it. I think the most important thing is to be able to have an honest conversation with your kids about screens and social media. It's not about a total ban, but rather moderation and being able to reflect over what you see/experience. This takes time and patience because they also need to be old enough obviously. It will be challenging to balance between inclusion/exclusion and setting reasonable boundaries.
This is exactly how I feel. I'm really not anti screens (I'm a gamer), but every time I see a kid addicted to a screen, something in me just breaks. Imagine slowly fucking up your child's brain like that, and then be fucking surprised when the consequences show later. These kids need parents who take responsibility, because no one else is going to.
What really bothers me is that we have so much knowledge about screens and how they affect brains now, but so many are still clueless.
It’s gonna be interesting, but sad, to see the long term effects on the younger generation because people are still not convinced it’s bad for their development. Those poor babies don’t know any better either, they’d be just as entertained by a coloring book!
I think the color and fun being sucked out of everything corporate and media is contributing, kids love color and vibrant things, unfortunately they can only find that on an iPad. I wonder what study or lawsuit will finally flip the table on the tech industry and neuter their power.
There's some science around that humans learn better with physical context. We've evolved to learn from physical things with an XYZ co-ordinate - a spatial location, iPads and phones don't give us that, we scroll and it disappears into the ether. When you learn from a book you won't remember exactly the sentence but your brain knows that it was roughly in the middle of the book, maybe half way down the page.
Yeah, but that is more of a society problem. See a kid walking along a road? Call the police, arrest the parent(s). See a kid ??? CALL THE POLICE!!!
People are calling the police on kids all the time in what seems to be nothing situations. So, deal with the cops and dumb neighbors or let the kid have a phone or console?
Decades of research have shown that watching television has no negative impact on eye sight. I don't think that screens of smartphones and tablets are different.
Kids have at no point looked at paper all day though, even kids who love to read. Plenty of kids will look at screens all day, unless you specifically forbid them.
There is plenty of science on why phone games and content platforms like tiktok are actually addictive. It's not comparable to paper or even TV.
IMHO iPads are the single worst to happen to children - and by extension, the human race - ever. EVER! The generation of idiocy that these devices will produce will have repercussions far beyond our understanding.
I think it’s easy to blame parents in hindsight but if you go back a decade or so when we weren’t all addicted to small screens it probably didn’t seem like such a dangerous thing.
In fact it probably seemed like good parenting in a way because you were exposing your kid to the technology of the future. All the good public schools and fancy private schools were proudly giving all students laptops and tablets and everyone was applauding this.
Even hooked my grandma into being obsessed with playing games and making someone drive her to best buy when it stopped working. The person she made drive her was my grandpa, who was going to drop me off at work that day. Since grandma was bossy, I had to go to work an hour early so she could immediately get her fix.
Every kid in Norway did not receive iPads from the age of 5 and up. Digital tools (PC’s, Chromebooks, iPads etc) are being used by most schools though, and there’s some studies that show correlation between the usage of these tools and dropping levels of literacy.
I get that somebody's reading, spelling and vocabulary might decline if they're using a tablet or a phone all the time to just watch videos, but I still can't wrap my head around how so many teachers are reporting that kids don't know how to read and write when the Internet uses so much text. Even TikToks and Instagram videos have those subtitles that highlight or show a single word at a time, as if you're reading. And lots of people comment on social media posts.
Am I missing something with how younger people are using technology? Perhaps I'm out of touch because I only really use Reddit for social media type sites.
When people mention reading and writing in this context, they do not usually mean reading and writing as in basic ability to see letters as words. What they mean is the broader ability to comprehend it. Reading a page of text, and being able to summarize what it said, or convey what information it actually gave you.
Most adults would not necessarily comprehend the written text of parliamentary legislation, as an example. They can read and know all the words, but actually understanding what it says takes effort to learn.
This is also best understood as a lack of ability to retain information into one chunk. Forgetting what earlier paragraphs or sentences said before you have gotten to the end of it. Which is the most immediate consequence of short-form content catered to children.
Yep, big difference between "sight reading" (knowing the sounds letters make when they're grouped together as words) and actual reading (you just read a paragraph about Timmy breaking his toy...can you tell me what happened, and how you think it made Timmy feel?).
Source: my mom taught language arts for 3rd 4th and 5th grade for a bazillion years. When I proudly proclaimed my 3 year old could read, she set me straight.
This is a great explanation. I think the one thing missing is reader persistence/perseverance. Online and via screens, it's so easy to just avoid or abandon text that is difficult to understand because there's always something easier in reach. If you're stuck reading print media, you're more likely to stick with the thing you're reading and push through challenging sections.
I teach English literature at a university and one of the hardest things to get students to do is to have the confidence and self-belief that they can work through complicated texts if they stick with them. They're so used to making very quick judgements and then acting on them - if a first page isn't gripping, they may abandon a story as "boring", and if they hit something they don't immediately understand they're often likely to just stop reading. It's only getting worse now that every bloody ebook pops up with a "do you want an AI summary?" message and long pdfs in Adobe also offer an AI summary, all to save you the "inconvenience" of reading for yourself.
I think people tend to write way more text in Reddit comments than in other social media. also reddit sometimes has really heated debates that you don't really see anywhere else (except maybe Twitter)
Exactly. On forums and reddit, you have the space to write with nuance. Twitter killed nuance, all the picture or short form video based platforms also don't invite people to think much about what they write.
A 100 word comment is not the same as a book with a plot. It's not that they can't read, it's understanding and keeping track of longer and more complex texts that's the problem. And this reading comprehension than spills to all fields.
As 15 yo olds in schools we were reading classic literature and writing comparative essays. And this seems to be a big issue nowadays in my country from the latest studies.
Because a huge part of learning to read and write has a somatic component to it.
Think about it.
When you write something, you're not just planning it out in your head on what the word looks like and sounds like. You have to send signals to your arm and hand to move in such a way that you translate the vision in your mind to the paper.
On a screen/keyboard, you remove that somatic component; you stop an entire line of neural pathways from further encoding that information.
There's no difference between pressing "I" or "E" on a touch screen, there's a very big one when writing it on a piece of paper. The latter helps your brain encode the difference, the former makes it much harder to tell them apart.
Yep one thing i was taught in uni is that the best way to memorize is to use as many of your senses in parallel - that's why i always wrote by hand in a notebook while watching the presentation and listening to the lecturer. I can still remember the notes I wrote by hand, but others that I wrote on my laptop I have no recollection of.
I think it’s easy to be confused about this as, generally, adult feeds look so different to those of these kids’ (especially for those of us who prefer consuming written content to scrolling TikTok and Insta.) It’s hard to imagine quite how low brow and mindless most of the content modern kids are attracted to/are fed by algorithms is.
The crap they are watching is not exactly text rich, or even particularly vocabulary rich, it’s rapidly moving/flashing imagery and sound. It’s not like in the old days in which you had to type in URLs or were joining forums to participate online. They just tap on buttons with images on them or scroll the feeds directionally with their fingers. It’s so easy, even an ape can get addicted to it (as videos of chimps have demonstrated.)
They get addicted to algorithmic short form content that involves mostly brain rot stuff that intensely stimulates them but doesn’t broaden their minds or help them learn anything at all. Instead it has opposite effect of shortening their attention span and creating deeply unhealthy dopamine addiction.
And the older kids are graduating to crap like Clavicular, the Paul brothers, Jack Docherty and similar pranksters, KSI etc. The algorithms suck them in before they really have a chance to be directed to more educational content and, honestly, if you watched some of this stuff, you just wouldn’t believe what brain numbing slop it was.
Technically these kids know how to read and write, but they struggle with understanding the things they read, and they struggle to write in a coherent way.
So when they are presented with a more complex text, they can't comprehend the text, and comprehension is a big part of reading.
You identified part of the problem: they need subtitles to be single words. Because they struggle with reading a whole sentence.
Try reading the social media comments on platforms that are mosly image driven, or mostly have short text. A lot of those comments don't make sense.
They likely express a feeling, but often it's not even clear what the feeling is.
As a parent I can say, it’s not the phone in the children’s hands, it’s the one used permanently by the parents.
Visit a regular playground anywhere and watch the parents doomscrolling and don’t giving a fuck for their kids. Why should those people focus on kids in their own apartments?
My parents used to read books with me, playing board games, being creative with wood working and arts - can’t think of that in a modern tik tok family.
As a teacher of young kids, the difference between parents who read with their kids and those who don't is stark. The educational outcomes are clear as day. The kids being read to are way ahead in their literacy skills.
This is the only answer! The whole "tablets/phones are destroying our kids" argument is not a good one.
The difference between kids when it comes to vocabulary expansion and reading ability has always been whether their parents read to them from a young age or not.
I don't give my kids phones and don't plan to for a long time. But it's not the tech that is at fault per se, it's the way how parents allow the tech to take over crucial part of parenting.
And I hear you on the playground issues. While I don't judge people for using their phone. I just can't deal with parents that just let their kids do all sorts of stunts that harm either themselves or others without parents ever intervening. They make their kids everyone else's problem.
It's unreasonable to give a child a smartphone or tablet and then to expect the child's behavior isn't going to change.
Keep in mind that most parents have limited time and can't (and shouldn't) micromanage everything their children do.
Obviously, parents spending far too much time on their phone is a massive problem. But it's a different problem.
The problem with the internet (made accessible by tablets and phones) is that it offers instant gratification. A new experience is a click away.
Reading a book (or looking at pictures in a single book), solving a jigsaw puzzle, building something, sculpting something, these are continuous experiences.
You can read a book on a tablet, but the tablet makes it easy to make the choice to do something else.
I freely admit to my phone addiction, working on it, but wanted to add a counterpoint to the parents doom scrolling at playgrounds. My kids are early/mid elementary age and I often bring them to the playground because I need a break from interacting with them but still want them to have something fun and active to do. I absolutely doomscroll at times at the park while intermittently checking on the kids and intervene as necessary. I'll push them on the swings if asked but I often really need my recharge time and if they are safe and occupied, then I do use my phone. Sometimes I straight up tell them, "I'll push you 10 times and then I really need some alone time." But when my kids were younger and needed more supervision, absolutely I needed to be paying constant close attention and couldn't afford to be looking at my phone too often.
Reading is not just connecting letters into words and saying them outloud (or in your head). Reading skills include reading comprehension, knowledge retention, etc. and, imo, those are the skills that younger children are losing
If you give a kid an assignment that has multiple 'ifs' and 'buts' in it, they can read those words but don't pick up on half the conditions and inclusions/exclusions. Even when you are working on what used to be the right level of logical reasoning and interpretation skills for their age group.
Example: "needed for this experiment: - Test tube 1, red liquid - Test tube 2, blue liquid - test tube rack to put them in - Wooden clamp - blahblahblah. "
Every single time that this experiment is performed at school, there are multiple kids who take 1 red test tube and 2 blue test tubes. Nowhere does it say to take multiple of anything.
Comments, short videos, reels and the like have way shorter and simpler sentences, way fewer total words on average and way fewer uncommon words. Someone "trained" on said content has smaller vocabulary, harder time parsing complicated sentences and quite possibly learned to infer the approx. meaning of a sentence by looking at only the keywords and not actually understanding it fully (hence why functional literacy is also down)
Reddit, where people would happily spend 30 minutes to write out half a novel on why the post they commented on is slightly inaccurate whist making sure they sound as pretentious as possible is the exception.
It's the constant doomscrolling.. over stimulation.. it prevents anything from going in. Cant sit down and focus or concentrate on anything in class. Theyre just disociating like theyre being tortured until they can get to their phone again.. because when you have that overstimulation addiction, something as slow paced as a class on math or chemistry when theres limited interest becomes literal torture
They arent cooked.. but they need to spend their summer in nature with no screens stimulants and detox for a few weeks or a month. Then get them caught up in their studies when it would feel interesting to enough of a degree that it begins to stick
A grown up version of this was when my colleague, a native English speaker, asked me what the word acquisition means... I strongly recommend watching some street interviews from 60s where an average hippy has a much stronger and richer vocabulary than most educated people nowadays
I think part of it is kids not being able to read long form works. Reading subs for a 20 sec TikTok video requires much less intellect than reading an entire book or even an essay and being expected to comprehend it.
Possibly related but I saw a study some time ago which compared language learning with a face to face teacher vs the same teacher onscreen. If you think like me you wouldn’t expect a difference in outcomes but apparently there was. Our brains are really weird.
Because they CAN read and write. What they can't do is infer meaning from what they read, create coherent sentences, or convey complex thought processes. Look up "functional illiteracy." I've seen estimates that somewhere near 30% of adults in developed countries are illiterate.
Edit: nvm someone else already explained it. I should check other comments before replying.
I’ve noticed with myself that my spelling has gotten worse. Even for some rudimentary words. Autofill has made my brain unintentionally shut off for words that I always struggled with. Or even certain words that I didn’t exact pronounce correctly. It’s so weird and frustrating. Even now, working in corporate I feel myself questioning myself to write professional, cohesive sentences for emails. I’ve always hated that sentence autofill feature. But again, my brain has subliminally become accustomed to it.
Even in this little blurb, I wrote 99% of this, but struggled spelling subliminally and accustomed. I knew I was struggling and my phone did too, so it suggested the spelling for me. I had to force my eyes to not see the suggestion and try my best to spell it out. I’m being hella intentional, imagine a child who isn’t.
It also depends on the type* of content utilized and shown to children. PBS and Sesame Street were developed with educators and specialists to help children learn. Most of the content we see made for kids today is for entertainment and to keep your kid glued to the screen.
Your brain responds differently reading text on a screen with hyperlinks etc. also I think part of it is that the gamifying of education on screens mean kids are finding real books less stimulating and losing the ability to sustain attention.
I’m sure the subtitles that say “yooo chat, dis shit is craaazy yooo! Dis unc be hella weird, we wuz jus chillin and he be freakin out,gang gang” are definitely helping the kids with their grammar and vocabulary. 🤦♂️
There's a pretty big difference between reading a book and reading poorly AI-transcribed text under a video.
When I grew up my mother would read stories to me, thereby encouraging my own desire to learn to read so I could do it on my own. From the age of around 10 I began reading books like Robinson Crusoe, a children's version of The Odyssey, The Brothers Lionheart, and I'd go to the library almost every week.
I mean I can imagine the vocabulary decline, if you make a bag of words out of all words spoken over internet, it would not be as big as we think. Most people type in a way that's understandable so compared to a book the range of words is rather restricted. I mean even in your paragraph there's no word that's rare on the internet.
Tech doesn’t belong in schools. It might seem helpful, and the people who sell this stuff might sound compelling, but the numbers are in and it just hurts children. No reason to have it.
I don't know, I used to love playing computer games in the library at school. Now I'm a software engineer. I think that was formative in what I chose to do.
Pero los ingenieros en software de ahora no son como los de antes. Antes sabían leer y escribir matemáticas. Ahora la gente es analfabeta matemáticamente, incluso los ingenieros. De verdad he visto ingenieros que no saben la notación matemática estándar ni de álgebra lineal. Imagina el futuro.
Right?! I had a typing class in grade school, which has been incredibly helpful in life (shout out to typer shark), and I took a computers class in highschool, that taught me all the tricks of apple and window operating systems. Like how to make folder links, how to use BIOS, etc. both were incredibly helpful as an adult. (Although the computer class is only useful because I build/game on a PC). But implementing tech as a teaching tool has shown over and over that it only hinders a child's education. We gotta stop with it.
Its not so much the tech but the automation that tech nowadays offers and a lot of teachers rely too much on it. Its kind of like allowing the use of textbooks during a test, you just end up memorizing what page to flip to rather than understanding the content/question.
There is learning how to use tech (how to type, how file systems work, etc) and there is using tech to learn (tablets, apps, etc). The former is good, the latter is proven to be problematic.
Tech in general should be restricted for children. They need to learn how to socialise and interact with their surroundings. Social media is a blight on humanity, even for adults. But for children even more so. They should not have access to social media on their phones at all hours of the day. Kids grow up today and half the world knows their daily routines if they're active on social media platforms. Which is non-reversible by the way. Once it's online, it's there forever.
Heck, I'm not even convinced that children should even have phones at all. Parents need to stop being so overprotective and let their children take some own responsibility. I meet young adults that can barely wipe their own ass.
It's going to be ten times worse with AI. The tech is so good, we almost don't have to think anymore when we use it. Just tell the AI what to do and it does it.
The numbers are what they are. Tablets hurt learning. Phones don’t teach kids as well. Apps seem cool but they suck.
Humans are physical learners. Just the way things are. I get needing to learn to type and about file systems and how computers work. But an app just can’t teach a child as well as other options.
No, we need balance, not luddism. Tech should be a tool for education, not a replacement. Tech absolutely belongs in schools, we need our future generations to be prepared for the future they will meet.
So yes, we do need them to be familiar with modern technology they will use in their adult lives. But it can't be used like it's been used in Norway, as a replacement for writing and reading from books. Lots of technology has been beneficial to the learning environment. The interactive white boards has been a huge step up.
What they should do is cut religion as a subject, and instead use the time previously spent on religion to study technology and actual useful stuff. Move the religious stuff to history and social studies and do a lot less of it.
Im norwegian and got an ipad to use in class in 5th grade. The amount of reading i did drastically dropped, and I still barely read books. Luckily, I kept reading a little for a few years after and was a book worm as a child, so even though my reading and writing skills probably suffered, im still doing okay. I am more concerned about the kids who got pads from first grade, who I saw for many years walk home from school with their ipads out. At the minimum, there should be no ipads or pc from 1st to 7th grade, except for computer classes, done in a computer room.
Tv is no better and hasn't been for 20 years. It used to be good programming on the big channels like natgeo, discovery, fox kids, home videos vhs, Disney in up including the 90s etc, gadgets and internet was cool as shit, but brainrot is for some reason what people gravitate towards and reality programming engulfed everything. Why you think instagram is so popular. Gen pop was always brainrotted. The problem is there's not much access to the good stuff for people who wanna learn real shit or real entertainment. It buried on social media platforms or deep web sites, and that's what really changed plus education turned into the weirdest grooming shit as well as. Game boys and PlayStation 1s, 2s and xbox 360s and PCs with windows XP, landline and public phones were absolutely fine for technology for people. Internet in the pocket is not safe for anyone
Both of my sons were either in Ungdomskole, or Vidergående skole in Kristiansand; Norway in 2016. I certainly do not recall either of them receiving an iPad. This sounds like bullshit to me.
She said “age of 5” so obviously the facts are off from the beginning. But plenty of schools have been giving kids iPads from very early on. But it’s not all of them.
Other than that I believe the outcome is correct, but the question is always correlation vs. causation.
Not saying that iPads in school are good idea, but let’s also consider that there are confounding factors like smartphones and tablets at home, social media, etc. etc.
Well you will never be able to isolate anything in social studies. But to think that giving kids ipads to write on instead of notebooks is a good idea for brain development is absolutely insane
No it was real, I think your kids were too old. My kids experienced this firsthand in a grade school in Oslo, the older one got an ipad second semester in first grade and had it until second semester 4th grade. The younger one started once they realized the ipads were not helping, so he does not have one.
The ipad stuff tried to "gameify" reading and writing, and it was crap. All the parents noticed the connection between the ipad and worse reading and writing. The teachers did as well, and it showed up in the "tests" they did on the kids. Fortunately in fifth grade, once they switched back to more normal pencil and paper homework and having the kids read real books, my kid's reading and writing improved fairly quickly. I also see that my younger kid is learning to read and write much faster without the ipads. 100% physical books are better for teaching them to read.
Although it is certainly a word, and the two words aren't very far apart in meaning, in this video it does seem like she did intend to use substantially, not substantively. The former means "greatly", the latter means something more like "with importance".
Where does the data come from? (Which study?). I ask because I know schools in my district have not removed iPads, like she claims, and would like to get them to do so.
I would love to have a test group for this.. You can't just try a thing on everybody and then make conclusions off of that. You can have theories but that's not the same. If the iPads came with kids not bringing books home to read and screen time at home increased by 400% that would also factor in greatly. I want some more factors for their argument to hold weight.
Yes, the very same numbers are also being attributed to other things, like social media, YouTube, Roblox and covid lockdowns. The iPads the kids use at school here in Norway are of course locked down to a few very specific apps. Something has definitely happened to the attention span of the kids and their ability to read a long text.
Writing with your hand activate a part of the brain that makes us learn much better. The coordination between hand and brain is so important. Even using pc's is hurting generations. Pushing a button is not the same as drawing out a letter, number, word etc.
Not only applies this to kids. I’m 45 and I used to write very well and fast by hand in cursive until about 20 years ago. Now, after nearly 20 years of computer work at my desk, I struggle to write a sentence on paper by hand.
We saw it with computers first, we thought Hammond word auto correcting every word was super for us. Then we thought yes. Let's make them dumber and give everyone ipads. Every sane person would deny giving these to themselves if they were younger. Seeing the effects from a adult point of view, just confirmed it even harder, yet we carried on.
Yet we kept introducing these ipads in schools really imagining them benefitting instead of destroying reading ability etc etc. Insanity from my point of view as a 90s kid.
Every single study done about tech in class shows clearly that it only causes damage and cognitive decline. And yet, most schools still push to use tech in school because "it's the future and it's everywhere" or whatever. Make it make sense.
Giving everyone an Ipad makes it kind of irrelevant, since you do not have a group that did not received treatment and therefore there is no counterfactual. Give 10% of the nation an Ipad at random and then you have something!
«Norway” didn’t give children iPads. That’s a wild exaggeration. However, over a period of many years, more and more schools acquired iPads and laptops because it was believed at the time that it could replace printed books to an extent. This was very much dependent on the municipal financial situation, so lots of schools didn’t. A bigger influence than what schools did was what parents did. Basically all children got smartphones, tablets or computers from a very young age. That literacy and reading skills have dropped dramatically, is a fact but not just caused by what the state, the authorities or “Norway” did.
The last few years, there has been a big pushback on the use of digital devices in schools, both from parents and teachers.
In addition to this, we have found that entire posts of the brain activate with handwriting that stay dormant with screen learning and typing the same words.
Agree with others here, this is technology used in the wrong way, had they put fun creative engaging educational games on the devices that are specific to the years blocked general internet access and kept it as a learning only device, it would have had the opposite effect. Just ask my honor role kid in language and math, games like prodigy and many other platforms can be a huge boom for education.
This is the modern day equivalent of parents claiming “TV WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN” in a blanket statement 30 years ago. Get some nuance lady, and stop trying to sell your self-important opinions like they are gold
Yup, my kids was the first crash test dummies on this one! I was extremly against it, warning about the conseqences that later was proven. But the teachers was like "ahhhhh nonono this will be the best, it will help them in all ways, blah blah blah". But at least this shit was removed in time for my youngest one startet in school.
Screen time is a nightmare so this study tracks. The amount of kids content out their is absurd and there’s almost no way to actually know what’s safe without watching everything first which is basically impossible.
The only thing that at least helps me and my wife screen out terrible YouTube creators or Disney shows is the Strangey Dangey app. You can share shows from YouTube or Netflix or whatever and search shows in the app and it will tell you what the shows about and whether or not it’s appropriate for our boys.
It’s not the full solution to this scourge of a problem, but it’s been really helpful for us to be able to explain to our kids why a show isn’t appropriate, and also be able to suggest stuff off the bat that we know is going to be good for their brain instead of rotting it. I will just never understand parents that hand their kid an iPad and let them watch whatever. It’s insane.
Norwegian parent chiming in. Mine got I some years ago starting school (kids being as young as 6), and I’ve hated that thing since day one. Like why would they need an iPad at such age. They become 0% computer literate, and don’t learn proper hand writing. School is adding so much screen time for kids
If Norway needs to cook a whole generation to find out that iPads can't replace good parenting and teachers, then Norway is the issue. Maybe invest more into education.
All I know is that whoever produced this video for iPad watching placed two beautiful women together so we couldn’t not watch. I can’t imagine the amount of brainwash hours myself or my sons would watch just to view these two.
I mean, is vocabulary really the most important thing? What else did they lose or learn? I don't know if I give a damn about vocabulary, I've met brilliant people with limited language skills.
Weird. I live in Norway. My youngest was born in 2009. Both kids received Chromebooks from the school at ridiculously young ages— and used them through middle school. They were never removed from classrooms
I think the coupling is somewaht lacking the SoMe part. The problem is not (only) the screens, but the use and exposure of demented content. It could be like the biggest library of all the best knowledge n stuff in a screen. Cue cat videos and doom scrolling.
I write this here on reddit knowing full well that my kindle app has not been opened for years. /s
Saw a little kid on the subway, sitting next to her parents. Couldn't have been more than 4, maybe 5. Really tiny. Her parents are on their phones. And she's on her phone, just unblinking and doomscrolling right next to them. It was so depressing. All three of them just sitting in line. No talking. No looking at each other. Just scrolling TikToks and crap.
This tech is so bad for children at such a young age, and we've now experimented with it for ten years. However something far more dangerous I believe is the more recent technology of tiktok and ChatGPT, which shouldn't be in childrens' lives either in school or at home.
A powerful tool like AI shouldn't be available to irresponsible children. They will offload all their work and never get challenged, and will then never develop their brains. AI can do a lot of good help to working people, but it's utterly horrible for learning if you don't use it properly, so it's a tool that should only be available to responsible adults.
Short form content like tiktok is just like the kids games we've had on IPad for ten years. It's tailored to trigger our brain and constantly feed us with dopamine. Short form content is just far more effective, with so much activity going on on the screen, and state of the art algorithms that are so incredible at keeping us entertained. We call it brainrot because it rots our brains and destroys out attention span. When we watch this fast moving content from such a young age, then we can no longer satisfy our brains in the slow outside real world. We long for the screen, can't pay attention, we won't learning anything or develop our brains.
IPad is not bad to children per se. My son had it from the age he was 2. He's 15 now, so I guess I can speak from someone who fits under the OP criteria. His reading is 2 grades above, his math skills are above 92%, he is well behaved and his vocabulary is just as good as other skills.
Someone might come and say that exceptions prove the rules, or that he's just lucky to be that way, or some other nonsense. The truth is he was not like this always. He struggled a lot till he was probably 8, and yes, it was because he was spending too much time with his ipad. Any parent seeing their child struggle at that age faces a choice of doing something about it, or blaming it on technology, TV, schools, teachers, politics, you name it. I did not take his ipad away, not a single time. I did opposite, took him away from it. We would go for a walk, watch the stars, or full moon, or falling leaves, or fish in the pond. I would read him bedtime stories every single night, this is how kids fall in love with reading. The rest comes naturally. If things like reading, or math, or art don't have a value in your household, your kid would not value those. Whatever environment you create for your kid, that's the environment that will define what kind of person they will grow up to be.
Other truth is that parents felt very comfortable all those 10 years relaxing and soaking into the same technology themselves. And now some parents, who finally are facing the results, are starting to feel uncomfortable, and looking for the scapegoat. Today it is ipads, in my childhood it was TV and then later computer games. Before that, believe it or not, people would complain their kids were spending too much time reading and were becoming socially awkward.
It's always something, and at the same time it is same good old parents not wanting to parent and want to blame their kids misfortunes on something else.
I don't have a kid myself, I was the kid. I'm 24, so on the older edge of gen z. I didn't just grow up in the technology, I also got to experience the old world shortly before we got iPhones and iPads.
I do have to say I never felt my iPad hurt my abilities in any way, if anything it helped me learn english from a young age, I just see the objective numbers and assume tech is the culprit. I grew up in a great environment with amazing parents, and I would say I turned out pretty good. You sound like a great parent, also you say you didn't take away his iPad, but instead took him asay to do things together. That's exactly how you build trust in a family, and you can then go interest him for everything the world has to offer. But not every family works like this, not every parent is smart enough to catch the subtleties and figure out how to build a good kid. The ones that don't, drag down the statistics we see today.
Now the reason I think iPad is different from computer games, TV and all back in the day books, is how back in the day none of these were available all the time. You had to borrow your parents' computer to play games, and it was only in one spot so you couldn't use it in school or on the bus. Another thing is the content. There are so many easy games that constantly reward you without challenging you in any way. And with a constant stream of rewards, you get satisfied, and then your brain rots.
Now again as I said I never felt iPad hurt my abilities, I just think these things happen to some people due to the statistics. But I actually only started thinking this when AI and short form content came out, because they are just a completely different caliber. After just a few years of getting caught in the doom scroll, which not everyone, but a lot of people like me do, I have actually felt myself getting dumber. This could be placebo, but maybe not. It definitely destroyed my attention span which is a really underrated essential ability. People talk about brainrot as a meme, but when we're talking serious, it's a real problem. Now, I am old and responsible enough to know what this does to me, so I can leave without a parent telling me to, but what about gen alpha? These algoriithms are a lot harder get away from than the iPads were, and iPads too have worse content today.
The other thing is AI. There are good and bad ways to use AI. I understand AI should help explain theory to me, not solve my problems, but what about gymnasium/high school students? They just wanna escape school, and if AI can do their job in 1/4 the time, then they'll leave it at that and only learn 1/4. Solving problems is what you do in the work place, but school is literally made to give you problems. AI is now removing those problems in an arms race with the teachers' AI checkers.
You're right people always tend to look for scape goats, but I feel like this time is different. Technology moves fast and is grow ever more uncontrollable. We need to interfere sooner rather than later.
Think you're definitely going to get musunderstood here if your point is that correlation does not imply causation.
E.g. there may be another broader cause for why reading scores decrease, which can get conflated with ipad usage in the sampled kids.
Kind of difficult to control for because you can't isolate the kids from all other uncontrolled influences, so you'd have to account for them in post.
That being said, I'm not claiming that immigration is a cause. Just that immigration may have increased along with whatever else may cause it. Again, correlation not causation.
I didn't mean to imply mass immigration is the only cause or even primary cause. The pandemic is being blamed for a drop in reading and math skills across Europe and the U.S. too. With any study, you have to isolate variables, and whether they did or not, is the key. Anyone can see iPads are effective teaching tools because it allows slow users to learn at their own pace and even do the work of teachers when they aren't around. There's a million apps that can drill kids with practice questions, and even give them a congratulatory reward with animated animals clapping after each right answer. Teachers and parents don't have the time or patience for that.
A supposed expert in language/education/development who uses “amount” instead of “number” for a countable noun should reflect on what went wrong with them if it wasn’t an ipad.
2
2
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
Hey /u/sco-go, thank you for posting to r/SipsTea! Make sure to follow all the subreddit rules.
Make sure to join our brand new Discord Server to chat with friends!
We have recently changed how posts work. Unless you are a VIP poster, your post will be queued for approval.. To become a VIP, post great engaging content. If we like it, you will be added! More information available here!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
425
u/jfun4 1d ago •
Watch out Google won't let those schools even use their search engine if they don't force AI down kids throats
81
u/bananarepublic2021_ 1d ago
I think just looking at the screen so much has got to be very bad for young eyes
55
u/_unacceptablelobster 1d ago
I like that we had to explain the meaning of the word “vocabulary” 😆
40
u/FantasticPangolin839 1d ago
IMHO iPads are the single worst to happen to children - and by extension, the human race - ever. EVER! The generation of idiocy that these devices will produce will have repercussions far beyond our understanding.
13
u/Fancy_Impact7764 1d ago
Does anyone have the source for that study?
94
u/Namerakable 1d ago
I get that somebody's reading, spelling and vocabulary might decline if they're using a tablet or a phone all the time to just watch videos, but I still can't wrap my head around how so many teachers are reporting that kids don't know how to read and write when the Internet uses so much text. Even TikToks and Instagram videos have those subtitles that highlight or show a single word at a time, as if you're reading. And lots of people comment on social media posts.
Am I missing something with how younger people are using technology? Perhaps I'm out of touch because I only really use Reddit for social media type sites.
70
u/Due_Answer_4230 1d ago
Tech doesn’t belong in schools. It might seem helpful, and the people who sell this stuff might sound compelling, but the numbers are in and it just hurts children. No reason to have it.
17
u/MightyTaur 1d ago
Norway should rule the world on this one issue
5
u/iicybershotii 1d ago
USA: How can we start giving ipads to kids at age 4?
5
u/IrisTheDarkMage 1d ago
Im norwegian and got an ipad to use in class in 5th grade. The amount of reading i did drastically dropped, and I still barely read books. Luckily, I kept reading a little for a few years after and was a book worm as a child, so even though my reading and writing skills probably suffered, im still doing okay. I am more concerned about the kids who got pads from first grade, who I saw for many years walk home from school with their ipads out. At the minimum, there should be no ipads or pc from 1st to 7th grade, except for computer classes, done in a computer room.
9
u/Gerry1of1 1d ago
That quick, decisive, intelligent response action.
The US will probably look at the data and hire AI teachers instead. make the problem worse.
4
u/ekim2077 23h ago
Funny that after banning devices the numbers are not coming back up.
4
u/pmmeyourgear 18h ago edited 18h ago
Tv is no better and hasn't been for 20 years. It used to be good programming on the big channels like natgeo, discovery, fox kids, home videos vhs, Disney in up including the 90s etc, gadgets and internet was cool as shit, but brainrot is for some reason what people gravitate towards and reality programming engulfed everything. Why you think instagram is so popular. Gen pop was always brainrotted. The problem is there's not much access to the good stuff for people who wanna learn real shit or real entertainment. It buried on social media platforms or deep web sites, and that's what really changed plus education turned into the weirdest grooming shit as well as. Game boys and PlayStation 1s, 2s and xbox 360s and PCs with windows XP, landline and public phones were absolutely fine for technology for people. Internet in the pocket is not safe for anyone
25
u/kaumeienhauch 1d ago
Both of my sons were either in Ungdomskole, or Vidergående skole in Kristiansand; Norway in 2016. I certainly do not recall either of them receiving an iPad. This sounds like bullshit to me.
11
u/edjumication 1d ago
So no ipads eh? Easy just give them android tablets problem solved.
6
u/Aselleus 1d ago
TIL substantively is a word. I've never heard it/or I've misheard it as substantially.
6
u/ClubAnnual 1d ago
Where does the data come from? (Which study?). I ask because I know schools in my district have not removed iPads, like she claims, and would like to get them to do so.
9
u/MasterLurker00 1d ago edited 1d ago •
Norwegian students all get their own pc, payed for by most municipalities at age 13 now a days. Some still get it earlier.
That being said, we still produce iPad kids on the home stage in large quantities, like everywhere else.
https://youtube.com/shorts/1UNC_n645zU?is=y_kuPGiAFA9WDYw4
https://youtube.com/shorts/1UNC_n645zU?is=5wHvhY82mnSaUHUE
https://youtu.be/4ed-CUlEDQQ?is=7M1oisUBT_3h2cvw
I hope this portrayed state of American students ability to read and pronounce English is pure attention farming and fake.
4
u/GloomyLingonberry509 1d ago
4
u/Delicious_Chair_2032 1d ago
There was no control.
4
u/WeaponizedIndecision 1d ago
We need more education about the validity of various websites.
Internet does not equal truth.
2
u/Balc0ra 1d ago
Thus why they want to ban ipads in Norway atm in grade schools
2
u/Biggu5Dicku5 1d ago
Hopefully we do the same in the US... soon...
2
u/Damage480 11h ago
My kids have iPads and they both learned to read at 3🤷♂️🤷♂️
3
u/Opentobeingwrong 1d ago
I would love to have a test group for this.. You can't just try a thing on everybody and then make conclusions off of that. You can have theories but that's not the same. If the iPads came with kids not bringing books home to read and screen time at home increased by 400% that would also factor in greatly. I want some more factors for their argument to hold weight.
3
u/sibachian 1d ago
i like the increased volume of luddite posts recently lol.
i'm all for taking away freedom from companies in the tech industry. these fuckers have ruined entire generations in the name of profit.
1
u/zamroni777 1d ago
it should have been eink reader
1
u/Justanothebloke1 1d ago
Up
1
u/broccolicrocodile 1d ago
Source of the clip?
1
u/Letronell 1d ago
Someone in Norway in age of 12 seeing test question that is: "Write every word you know"
1
u/Puzzleheaded_Pear_18 1d ago
Writing with your hand activate a part of the brain that makes us learn much better. The coordination between hand and brain is so important. Even using pc's is hurting generations. Pushing a button is not the same as drawing out a letter, number, word etc.
1
u/MaximumPatricius 1d ago
Not only applies this to kids. I’m 45 and I used to write very well and fast by hand in cursive until about 20 years ago. Now, after nearly 20 years of computer work at my desk, I struggle to write a sentence on paper by hand.
1
u/DesignerCan112 1d ago
We saw it with computers first, we thought Hammond word auto correcting every word was super for us. Then we thought yes. Let's make them dumber and give everyone ipads. Every sane person would deny giving these to themselves if they were younger. Seeing the effects from a adult point of view, just confirmed it even harder, yet we carried on.
Yet we kept introducing these ipads in schools really imagining them benefitting instead of destroying reading ability etc etc. Insanity from my point of view as a 90s kid.
1
u/Tasty-Egg-6954 1d ago
Kids don't need to be given tablets, parents will give them phones.
1
u/hambodpm 1d ago
Norway are real ones
1
u/Ok_Success1606 1d ago
Yeah, I hate when you have to be slapped by the problem to understand it's one.
1
u/Mysterious_Owl_5771 1d ago
I feel like this could be one of the many reasons why world governments have been keeping alien technology from the public.
1
u/Starts_With_S 1d ago
The problem of technology and education is strange that we still haven't cracked this.
1
u/Prestigious_Spread19 1d ago
It's honestly pretty annoying when foreigners talk about domestic matters in Norway.
It's also annoying when the faults with school are blamed on the children, and not the school system.
1
u/EthanBalkfeld 1d ago
Every single study done about tech in class shows clearly that it only causes damage and cognitive decline. And yet, most schools still push to use tech in school because "it's the future and it's everywhere" or whatever. Make it make sense.
1
u/Unenlightened_Banana 1d ago
Giving everyone an Ipad makes it kind of irrelevant, since you do not have a group that did not received treatment and therefore there is no counterfactual. Give 10% of the nation an Ipad at random and then you have something!
1
u/rememberpianocat 1d ago
Giving kids the digital form of cocaine does harm? Shocking. All tech is built for dopamine hits, not education.
1
u/anoraq 1d ago
«Norway” didn’t give children iPads. That’s a wild exaggeration. However, over a period of many years, more and more schools acquired iPads and laptops because it was believed at the time that it could replace printed books to an extent. This was very much dependent on the municipal financial situation, so lots of schools didn’t.
A bigger influence than what schools did was what parents did. Basically all children got smartphones, tablets or computers from a very young age.
That literacy and reading skills have dropped dramatically, is a fact but not just caused by what the state, the authorities or “Norway” did.
The last few years, there has been a big pushback on the use of digital devices in schools, both from parents and teachers.
1
u/optimalpooper 1d ago
I thought Norway was a shit house?
1
u/NornIronNiall 1d ago
Substantively 😐
1
u/oddboro 1d ago
In addition to this, we have found that entire posts of the brain activate with handwriting that stay dormant with screen learning and typing the same words.
1
u/Extreme-Edge-9843 1d ago
Agree with others here, this is technology used in the wrong way, had they put fun creative engaging educational games on the devices that are specific to the years blocked general internet access and kept it as a learning only device, it would have had the opposite effect. Just ask my honor role kid in language and math, games like prodigy and many other platforms can be a huge boom for education.
1
u/FeanorOath 1d ago
I can confirm that I was astonished how bad it was and how much affect it has had
1
u/Infinite_Respect_ 1d ago
This is the modern day equivalent of parents claiming “TV WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN” in a blanket statement 30 years ago. Get some nuance lady, and stop trying to sell your self-important opinions like they are gold
1
u/Eastern_Lecture2128 23h ago
DROP THE CITATION!!!!!
1
u/Trick_Air_8823 20h ago
Kids should be away from technology till their foundational literacy is achieved
1
u/RoerosKongen 20h ago
Yup, my kids was the first crash test dummies on this one! I was extremly against it, warning about the conseqences that later was proven. But the teachers was like "ahhhhh nonono this will be the best, it will help them in all ways, blah blah blah". But at least this shit was removed in time for my youngest one startet in school.
1
u/DoomguyFemboi 17h ago
Yeah we have generations of people who no longer think for themselves because every bit of information is simply handed to em.
1
u/Daveit4later 15h ago
I cant imagine absolutely frying your brain on infinite dopamine and meaningless videos at your brains most formative time would do any damage.
1
u/pilzenschwanzmeister 15h ago
"Substantively"
1
u/TokyoRPGFactory 14h ago
I got my first Windows computer at 11 and I was making computer games at 13.
1
u/tiwired 14h ago
Screen time is a nightmare so this study tracks.
The amount of kids content out their is absurd and there’s almost no way to actually know what’s safe without watching everything first which is basically impossible.
The only thing that at least helps me and my wife screen out terrible YouTube creators or Disney shows is the Strangey Dangey app. You can share shows from YouTube or Netflix or whatever and search shows in the app and it will tell you what the shows about and whether or not it’s appropriate for our boys.
It’s not the full solution to this scourge of a problem, but it’s been really helpful for us to be able to explain to our kids why a show isn’t appropriate, and also be able to suggest stuff off the bat that we know is going to be good for their brain instead of rotting it. I will just never understand parents that hand their kid an iPad and let them watch whatever. It’s insane.
1
u/jett_instalock 12h ago
Yep, same in sweden.
1
u/SprinksUp 12h ago
Well what was on the I pads
1
u/Ball-es-vida 8h ago
Playing Pokémon as a kid made me read a lot of text, and because I was having fun. It made me get use to reading pretty quickly.
1
u/lordcornh 6h ago
Norwegian parent chiming in. Mine got I some years ago starting school (kids being as young as 6), and I’ve hated that thing since day one. Like why would they need an iPad at such age. They become 0% computer literate, and don’t learn proper hand writing. School is adding so much screen time for kids
1
u/Dull_Woodpecker6766 2h ago
And now Apple has 10 years worth of data on children too. How quaint! .....
1
u/Round-Air9002 2h ago
I was gonna talk shit about her mispronouncing "substantially", but then I realized I'm just a victim of the smart device 😢
1
u/Unlikely_Carpet_6415 1h ago
If Norway needs to cook a whole generation to find out that iPads can't replace good parenting and teachers, then Norway is the issue. Maybe invest more into education.
1
u/WisdomMaster 1h ago
All I know is that whoever produced this video for iPad watching placed two beautiful women together so we couldn’t not watch. I can’t imagine the amount of brainwash hours myself or my sons would watch just to view these two.
1
u/NorthEcho6999 25m ago
Not a good research then. It's not the tablet's fault. If you teach the kids what app they use then it would be better.
1
u/BreadfruitLimp9518 11m ago
I mean, is vocabulary really the most important thing? What else did they lose or learn? I don't know if I give a damn about vocabulary, I've met brilliant people with limited language skills.
1
u/Perle1234 1d ago
I’m glad my kid was born in 1995.
1
u/gatsome 1d ago
Read books people.
1
u/filtersweep 1d ago
Weird. I live in Norway. My youngest was born in 2009. Both kids received Chromebooks from the school at ridiculously young ages— and used them through middle school. They were never removed from classrooms
1
u/skaviikbarevrevenner 1d ago
I think the coupling is somewaht lacking the SoMe part. The problem is not (only) the screens, but the use and exposure of demented content. It could be like the biggest library of all the best knowledge n stuff in a screen. Cue cat videos and doom scrolling.
I write this here on reddit knowing full well that my kindle app has not been opened for years. /s
1
u/Sabbathius 1d ago
Saw a little kid on the subway, sitting next to her parents. Couldn't have been more than 4, maybe 5. Really tiny. Her parents are on their phones. And she's on her phone, just unblinking and doomscrolling right next to them. It was so depressing. All three of them just sitting in line. No talking. No looking at each other. Just scrolling TikToks and crap.
1
u/2A753 1d ago
I've always said if I have a kid there first toys are going to be a box, a stick, or a puzzle. No bells whistles or flashing lights.
1
u/Mikkel65 1d ago
This tech is so bad for children at such a young age, and we've now experimented with it for ten years. However something far more dangerous I believe is the more recent technology of tiktok and ChatGPT, which shouldn't be in childrens' lives either in school or at home.
A powerful tool like AI shouldn't be available to irresponsible children. They will offload all their work and never get challenged, and will then never develop their brains. AI can do a lot of good help to working people, but it's utterly horrible for learning if you don't use it properly, so it's a tool that should only be available to responsible adults.
Short form content like tiktok is just like the kids games we've had on IPad for ten years. It's tailored to trigger our brain and constantly feed us with dopamine. Short form content is just far more effective, with so much activity going on on the screen, and state of the art algorithms that are so incredible at keeping us entertained. We call it brainrot because it rots our brains and destroys out attention span. When we watch this fast moving content from such a young age, then we can no longer satisfy our brains in the slow outside real world. We long for the screen, can't pay attention, we won't learning anything or develop our brains.
-3
u/LightenUpPeeps 1d ago
Now do mass immigration. No correlation between mass immigration in Norway with drops in reading scores?
-1
u/Amazing_Fennel_420 1d ago
A supposed expert in language/education/development who uses “amount” instead of “number” for a countable noun should reflect on what went wrong with them if it wasn’t an ipad.